The Aerie
I'm here at the new Minneapolis Public Library, which opened to great fanfare last weekend. I'm working on some paperwork best attended to outside the confines of the office.
I haven't taken a tour of the library, but it's basically nice enough. I'm not educated enough to wax loquacious about the architecture, but it IS full of windows. Lots and lots of windows. In fact, this library is MOSTLY windows. Even the walls are semiopaque glass panels, so that I can from where I sit make out the blurry image of a book cart on the other side. The object in the front is a desk lamp, a severe right-angle of brushed aluminum that says "I'm only here to give you light, getcher asthetics someplace else."
I was not surprised but of course annoyed to discover how much they limit their firewall. No access to Instant Messaging was not surprising No SSH was surprising and annoying. I know why they did it, but I don't approve. But the weirdest limitation I hit was when I searched for prongoraphy using the incendiary search phrase, "learning style experiential didactic"...
(By the way, I'm deliberately misspelling some words so that my use of them does not attract search engines. You want to get a bunch of useless hits on your website, use those words spelled correctly a few times and every hroni teenager from around the world will be eating up your bandwidth in search of the elusive nekkid pitchers.)
Anyway, I typed that salacious phrase into Google, and received this link. But when I clicked on it...
| STOP You cannot access the following Web address: http://www.csaeurope.com/index.php?id=experiential
The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Pornography |
Fortunately for my "research" (yeah, yeah, we all know what I was REALLY after) I was able to hit the Google Cache button, and slate my thirst for didactic deconstructionism using stale information.
So I can't chat, I can't connect to my own server (except of course through my cell phone), and I can't satisfy my urges for experiential exposition. But on the other hand, this place has lots of books!
Posted by Albatross at May 23, 2006 3:47 PM | TrackBack